About 20 years ago I was at the Viewmont Mall in my hometown of Dickson City, Pennsylvania, with a friend who we’ll call Night Hawk. Night Hawk and I were not close, but at that age when you had the opportunity to get dropped off at the mall you took it, no matter who you were going with. We walked the mall’s entirety, which included my favorite activity: freeing the small animatronic pig that was caged in the border of the KB Toys stand-up sign. Normally the pig was doomed to walk directly into the edge of that sign for all eternity, like a roomba that could not turn around. They were allowed to see the rest of the mall but never to explore it. I wanted to give them a taste of freedom, even if they always ended up back in their pen eventually. Once the pig was free and sauntering past Claire’s, Night Hawk and I stepped outside and I told him about a new game I was playing on GameCube, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I knew nothing about it except that there was a mechanic where the titular prince would lose more and more clothing as the game progressed. Night Hawk joked about turning off the console just before the final level opened, for fear of seeing the Persian Prince completely nude. I giggled a response and nodded, but I knew it was a lie. I wanted very much to play the final level.
As a fresh teen who was both very closeted and also pretty clear on the fact that I was not like my other male friends, presenting as what I considered to be a “normal guy” was important to me. I thought fighting games would be safe in that respect, but it wasn’t long before my dad asked why I only played as Chun-Li or Sakura during Street Fighter. I mumbled something about the other characters not being fast enough, but really I just wanted to play as the cool girls. Prince of Persia presented a wonderful opportunity though. He was a rugged, blade wielding, time rewinding prince on a quest to save a woman who seduces him in a bath house. It was hetero as hell and surely couldn’t out me. So what if the only reason I bought it was both interest and terror at the thought of the prince having his clothes torn off little by little over time? It was a sleeve here, a knee patch there. It was all in good fun. But where would it end? The idea that I may actually see a naked man in this game filled my teenage soul with a seductive dread. I wanted it. I did not want it. Either way, I had to play.
The game itself was easy to love. It offered dynamic platforming and action, and the ability to rewind in a situation where you otherwise would have died was exciting and more fulfilling than selecting “continue” from a load screen. The ability set of the prince was creative and fun. I could wall run, turn enemies to sand, slow time, stop time, and much more. I bought the game out of curiosity, but ended up really enjoying it. The play was always secondary to my true mission though. I needed to see just how much the prince would lose.
Now, of course, there was no way the Prince of Persia was ever going to be nude in this rated T for Teen GameCube game. He was simply never going to hang dong, but at 13 I wondered. Of course I didn’t want him to be nude, that would be crazy, but if he was then it was just part of the game and I would have to respect that. I was lucky enough to have an attachable screen that connected to my GameCube. This made it easier to bring it with me depending on whether I was staying with my mom or my dad. The screen also made it so I would sit quietly and not monopolize the TV. I’d lay there on my belly, propped up on my elbows, feet up like a girl posing for her senior picture, surrounded by my family but focused exclusively on the Prince of Persia. Every time a new piece of his clothing would drop my heart would skip a beat, but I played it cool. I was doing a “normal man” activity and enjoying it in a “normal man’s” way.
Overall and to both my relief and disappointment, the nameless Prince of Persia does little more than lose his shirt over the course of the entire game. While this was used as a marker of progress through many painstaking battles and not as a means of exciting homosexual boys, I’m still grateful for it as a mechanic. In a game that is so explicitly about time it was nice to feel like things were changing as I went, that the damage wasn’t just vanishing and that every hardship left some type of lasting impact. It made it feel like the prince was both struggling and growing, leaving behind his sheltered youth and becoming a battle-hardened hero. Also, as a gay child who was not ready for just about anything, it was nice to have a safe space to at least entertain the thought of a naked man, even if part of me knew it would never go that far. I knew I liked him better without his shirt on. I knew that, were the Prince of Persia to somehow become nude in the final chapter of his rated T for Teen GameCube game, Night Hawk would have turned it off, but I would have kept playing, and in that, I knew a little more about myself.
Dave Tomaine is a comic writer and musician from Philadelphia. You can find him at @cavedomain and @FFBedtime on Twitter.